Internet of Things - A Missed Opportunity in the Fight Against COVID-19

In the residential setting, truly smart homes could have been a lifeline for the billions isolated under home quarantine for months (and in some cases, for over a year),

especially for those with medical conditions that require ongoing monitoring by a doctor or by family members. Air quality monitoring, physical security, home automation and important health requirements could have been addressed at scale by existing IOT technology, but sadly the best that most countries could offer was primitive forms of telemedicine.

Smartphones turned out to be effective in evaluating stay-at-home regulations in some countries but lacked other useful dimensions of data necessary for them to play a more critical role in assessing and informing individuals about their possible COVID status, mostly due to an understandable sensitivity around emerging technology and personal privacy.

Wearables, on the other hand, should have been the star of this pandemic, offering location, temperature, pulse, and respiratory monitoring that couldhave identifiedif an individual were potentially COVID-positive and notifying them to quarantine and undergo further testing. The same data could have been aggregated to monitor the spread of the disease, measure the effectiveness of control protocols, and even cross-checked with other data for rapid mass contact-tracing. The same technology could also have been used to enforce home isolation, mitigating the need for government-controlled facilities, and allowing people to isolate at home with loved ones.

This is not to say that IOT was completely absent from this pandemic, but that its range, scope, and accessibility was so small as to be barely detectable amidst the 160 million cases. We need to take the steps necessary to ramp up the adoption of this technology and give us a better fighting chance when the next pandemic comes.